To TF & authors: Is it ok to depend on jQuery that much?

You think is it ok to depend on jQuery plugins that much (notably jCarousel, s3Slider, and such) to make templates? I don’t want to name (I should though) but so many templates here are heavily based on jQuery stuffs and without them they’re just around 50 lines of CSS and HTML .

And that’s not all. Those with jQuery stuffs have higher prices. Imagine 2 similar templates one without jQuery things with a price around 10 bucks, and another with jQuery stuffs, say 25 bucks.

If both sale 10 times, the second one gets 100 bucks while the first one gets only 40 bucks, so the thing happening here so much is just reshaping jQuery plugins that someone else created and make money with them.

I know everything about licenses and etc, and I’m not going to say it’s a wrong thing authors are doing. No, the point is that TF must not set the prices based on the amount of jQuery used in a template.

Also, authors, ok I know we’re all here to make money and when something sells like crazy everyone wants to go that way (even myself), but if we see it in long term, we’ll see a TF full filled with hundreds of identical items all heavily dependent on identical jQuery stuffs, however it’s so already, but if we don’t stop it, it’ll get worse, and TF will lose its success. This’s definitely bad for both sides.

Yeah I really wish a template without jQuery could be priced the same as one with, but I guess it just doesn’t seem functional enough. jQuery does allow us to display more content on the one page using cool animations and effects.

But now that they are simple plugins that are basically plug&play I think the pricing should be so different between the two.

A lot of developers are still learning jquery including myself and I guess one of the reasons why they’re popular because people are using the templates they have downloaded as an example for learning how to do it.

I am working on a html template at the moment that I don’t plan to add jquery to, but will feature an animated flash header just to do something different.

It will be interesting to see how TF prices it and how well it will sell.

jQuery is so customizeable, and has so many features, tools, plugins, scripts, etc for it. If you master it, and use combinations of scripts that you find or write yourself, your themes will sell like crazy. Everyone likes a little spice in their themes, especially if its unobtrusive and gracefully degrades.